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their environment,” she says. Long View is like recording at home, but you don’t have to make your bed.
    It’s with that spirit in mind that, in January 2001, the Tufts Beelzebubs—the university’s oldest a cappella group—came to Long View to record Next . Not that Bonnie Milner wasn’t skeptical of the Beelzebubs. Understandably she was concerned about turning the historic studio over to a bunch of college kids. “But the Bubs had too much charisma,” she says. Two years later the Bubs went back to record a new album, Code Red , checking into Long View for nine nights. And as advertised, the Bubs were inspired. For “Disarm”—originally a Smashing Pumpkins song— the Bubs wanted an intimate sound. And so inside the studio the Bubs dimmed the lights and lit candles while the engineer set up fifteen sets of headphones so they could record the track as close to live as possible. “It’s probably my fondest memory,” says Chris Kidd ’05, who sang the solo on “Disarm.” Still, there were drawbacks to Long View. “We were burning through money,” says Ed Boyer, Beelzebubs class of 2004, the group’s music director for much of that year. To cut costs the Bubs slept three and four guys to a suite. But, at the end of the week, they got a bill for somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen thousand dollars. They would go on to spend another fifteen thousand dollars to mix the CD, have art designed, and print the thing. (Mixing an album means, among many other things, deciding what elements belong in the foreground of each track and what should be in the background.)
    Which begs the question: How can a collegiate a cappella group afford to spend thirty thousand dollars producing an album? Especially when—despite their forty-year history and active alumni base—they don’t receive a dime from the old guys? The short answer: gigs. The Bubs, because of their legacy and professionalism, can charge upward of three thousand dollars for one thirty-minute concert at a prep school. (The year the Bubs produced Next they earned a group record of nearly fifty-five thousand dollars.)
    That so many iconoclasts recorded at Long View seems fitting. Because Code Red may be the most controversial album in the history of collegiate a cappella. When the album was released in 2003, the Bubs actually received hate mail. “It blows my mind that people would waste time writing letters ,” Ed Boyer says. “But they did.” What did those letters say? “That the Bubs were ruining a cappella.”
    Despite its proximity to Harvard, the Tufts University Beelzebubs—founded in 1963—may be Boston’s premier collegiate a cappella group. And the proof is in the gigs. The Bubs regularly sing with the famous Boston Pops. They’ve performed at Carnegie Hall. In October of 2004, they were hired to sing at John Kerry’s final stump speech in Boston, just weeks before the presidential election. There have been other high-profile Beltway gigs over the years too. In 2000, Tufts president Larry Bacow hosted an event at his home, honoring an even more esteemed POTUS, Bill Clinton. The Bubs were asked to sing “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow),” President Clinton’s campaign theme song, which they did. A few years later, when Hillary Clinton came through town on her own tour, again the Bubs got the call. Matt Michelson, then the group’s business manager, e-mailed the Bubs repertoire over to a contact at President Bacow’s office. She replied quickly, nixing nearly every song on the list— even the Simon and Garfunkel tune “Cecilia,” a Bubs staple. “They wouldn’t let us sing ‘Cecilia’ because it had the words up in my bedroom ,” Michelson says. Bacow’s team, perhaps still sensitive to the Monica Lewinsky fallout, did not want to offend the First Lady and thus specified “nothing sexual.” Michelson jokingly replied to the e-mail suggesting the Bubs sing the Tears for Fears track “Everybody Wants to Rule the